If you post it, they will come. Was that the extent of your strategy behind creating your website? The pervasiveness of content marketing in today’s business world doesn’t mean that it’s an easy undertaking.

The sheer volume of users is both the beauty and the curse of online marketing. You have a nearly infinite pool of potential customers but you need a strategy to differentiate yourself from the competition. Here are some solid tactics that have proven successful for increasing traffic hits on your site.

Companies in California are beginning to understand what it takes to be successful at inbound marketing. When I tell CEOs and business owners what I do, I tell them that I help those in their station who are frustrated by an under-performing web presence. In fact, I talk with a lot of these folks, and lately, the two biggest problems I've been hearing are:

Yes, it’s a big investment in time and energy to write a blog, particularly if you follow conventional wisdom on the topic that says you should do it several times per week if you want to be successful in driving traffic to websites. If you are like many people, you can come up with reasons why blogging may seem an unreasonable proposition:

You’ve probably heard discussions about it and maybe even thought about doing it, but if you haven’t consolidated your Google mojo by directing all traffic to one URL, then you are diluting your internet presence considerably.

A big part of keyword research is to make sense of the data that you have. Many tools provide statistics on keywords, but one thing I've run into a number of times is the difficulty in seeing the forest for the trees. For example, the Hubspot Keyword Grader tool is an excellent utility for helping find viable keywords for your online presence. It can be used in multiple ways to suggest keywords both from seed entries that you provide and by evaluating particular websites themselves and churning out words that they may be ranking for.

Inbound Marketing requires notable investment in time and energy in order to be successful. You start with an exhaustive keyword search which results in focus for your website presence, develop content around that focus, and then generate calls to action that serve to entice qualified leads to submit their contact information on your well crafted landing pages. Yes, a lot of work went in to all that, and now the leads start coming in - what a great feeling that is.

HEY, I JUST SPENT A TON OF MONEY ON MY WEBSITE - SO WHERE'S THE TRAFFIC?

We often hear people lamenting the fact that they invested in a re-design to upgrade their websites, only to find that the effort didn't result in an increase in traffic at all. In fact, oftentimes the re-design efforts may have actually worked against some sites because Google doesn't adapt well to large scale changes that occur all at once - it's just the way its ranking algorithm is engineered.